We seem to be living in riven times. (Though one could ask with substantial justification: When hasn’t humanity lived in riven times?)

Schisms abound, and they appear to be more rancorous and sharp than at any time in recent memory. The European Union is fragmenting; the French may well follow the lead of their counterparts across the channel by doing a “Frexit,” with the added dimension of electing an overt racist to lead them.

Much of the world stays mired in intractable poverty under the autocracies and kleptocracies that serve as both its cause and effect.

And in the United States, we endure, in a kind of downcast awe, the awfulness that is Donald Trump.

So is the vaunted center, that core of shared values and aspirations and steady-minded tending of continued progress in the human project, whatever the differences in means and tactics to achieve it, slipping away from us?

Is the center no longer...

I’d been browsing earlier in the week for poems about spring, with the intention of sharing one or two on this blog’s or my personal Facebook page. Find a lovely photo of a flower or mustard field to accompany it, rejoice in all the rebirthing metaphors and imagery, have a feel-good post in time for the feel-good day of Easter Sunday, when the very heavens (or at least all our cultural icons) seem to sing in lush harmonies about the joys of the season.

And so here popped “Spring” by Edna St. Vincent Millay onto my computer screen—and there went the easy breezy mood of spring along with it.

Darn these dead-serious poets and their recalibrations of all we cling to as balm for our aching souls!

***

“Spring” appeared in the volume “Second April” in 1921, when Millay was 29 years old and accomplished enough that a mere two years later she would become the third woman ever to win the Pulitzer P...

“Our Delight in Destruction,” read the headline from a recent philosophy blog in the New York Times. (Yes, actual philosophers blogging in readable English in a daily newspaper—hope lives!)

This was just a day after I had come across and held to my eyes a treasured volume, “Irrational Man,” a 1960s-era study of the great existential philosophers who detailed the human penchant for, well, not always behaving in the optimal fashion to promote our own best interests (nor the well-being of those around us).

And through both those works, a long chew through Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Self-Reliance,” a far-reaching, soul-stirring anthem celebrating, no matter how “destructive” or “irrational” it might appear to those other thinkers mentioned above, the absolute primacy of the Self, the lone self-reflective individual, our own deepest heart of hearts, for whom the Bard of Concord intoned:

It’s a dream, but the images are sharp as daylight. I’m on one of our well-traveled byways, nearing a crosswalk on Summerfield Road. Shenzi is about six feet out on her leash, and she inexplicably ambles out into the road a few feet before I am there, disregarding all her training. I pull back on the leash and she is a little slow to respond. Then I see cars are dangerously closer and she is still out a few feet on the roadway.

Now I pull more emphatically on the leash, but Shenzi, again inexplicably, digs in. I easily overpower her, but as I pull her to safety toward me I see the leash and her collar are kind of tangled at the top of her head. No squeals or cries, but as I reel her in I confront a horrid sight.

She is looking directly into my eyes but her left eye is grotesquely swollen and bulging and beginning to leak fluid...

***

Everybody’s wonderin’ what and where they all came from
Everybody’s worryin’ ’bout where they’re gonna go
When the whole thing’s done
But no one knows for certain
And so it’s all the same to me
I think I’ll just let the mystery be

***

“Through the ontological interpretation of Dasein as being-in-the-world no decision, whether positive or negative, is made concerning a possible being toward God. It is, however, the case that through an illumination of transcendence we first achieve an adequate concept of Dasein, with respect to which it can now be asked how the relationship of Dasein to God is ontologically ordered.”
—From Martin Heidegger’s essay, “On the Essence of Ground” (1928)

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Some say once you’re gone you’re gone forever
And some say you’re gonna come back
Some say you rest in the arms of the Saviour
If in sinful ways you lack

 ***

“How do we know there is an afterlife? B...